Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgard Varese

Varese makes music sound less like a language and more like physics: an "internal structure" that keeps its identity even as it fractures into "different shapes or groups of sound". That phrasing is doing quiet polemical work. He is rejecting the old prestige model of composition - melody as protagonist, harmony as proper grammar - and recasting the composer as an engineer of forces. The point is not to tell a story but to build a system that can withstand constant mutation.

The subtext is modernism with its gloves off. "Expanded and split" evokes an era obsessed with fragmentation: Cubism in painting, Freud in psychology, the city as a machine for living, war as industrial process. By describing sound as matter that can be shaped, accelerated, and redirected, Varese positions the orchestra (and later the studio) as a laboratory. The listener isn't meant to hum along; they're meant to feel pressure, collision, gravity, recoil.

Context matters here because Varese spent his career insisting that music had to catch up with the 20th century's actual sonic environment: sirens, factories, radio, electricity. His famously percussive works and his fascination with electronic instruments weren't novelty; they were consequences of this worldview. "Attracted and repulsed by various forces" is also a sly defense against accusations of chaos. The music may sound volatile, but it's not arbitrary. The drama is structural: a controlled turbulence where form is felt as motion, not as etiquette.